Promise of Eternal Youth Dashed

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Promise of Eternal Youth Dashed

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ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida – Damn it, I don't feel even one minute younger.

Not that I really expected that drinking a tiny plastic cup's worth of water purportedly spewed directly from the Fountain of Youth would magically reverse the aging process.

But since I was in St. Augustine anyway, and since it was my birthday, it seemed like I should make a pilgrimage to the tourist attraction formally known as the Fountain of Youth Park, which bills itself as home to the mysterious spring that supposedly drove Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon to cross the ocean in search of its promise of renewal.

So I slurped the water the guide offered to me. It tasted and smelled quite distinctly of sulfur. I waited for a tingle, a spark, a shiver. Nothing happened. Nothing also appeared to have happened to the gaggle of giggling senior citizens who also were swilling the water, even after they all demanded, received and downed a second cupful of the sharp-tasting fluid.

Oh, well, at least I had been warned. The woman who collected my cash at the park gate had cheerfully assured me the water would surely catapult me right back to my youth – but only if I truly believed it would. Obviously I am doomed to living what remains of my life as an ever-aging skeptic.

As it turns out, though, it's quite probable that even Ponce de Leon didn't believe in the Fountain of Youth. And it's possible the legend of the explorer and the miraculous fountain was nothing more than a nasty little gibe aimed at Ponce de Leon's manhood.

Youth, as anyone who's scanned the spam in e-mail inboxes knows, requires a voracious sex drive and the ability to physically fulfill those lustful yearnings. So anyone who is willing to spend a fortune (Ponce de Leon financed his own voyage, an expensive undertaking) in search of a substance that would magically restore youth must have been either a madman, a crazed dreamer or impotent – and pretty pissed off about that sad state of affairs.

"It's quite possible that the rumor about Juan Ponce de Leon desperately setting off in search of the Fountain of Youth was a deliberate insult to his memory or was intended to insult the powerful de Leon family, since the fountain stories don't start showing up until several decades after Juan Ponce de Leon's death," said Carlton Hammel, a Florida resident who's devoted the last 13 years to researching the Fountain of Youth story.

"But it's equally likely the whole fable sprang from a mistake by one historian, which was subsequently elaborated on by other historians throughout the centuries," Hammel said.

The voyage charter Ponce de Leon received from King Ferdinand gave the explorer permission to seek and claim the lands or islands he discovered and to profit from those discoveries. There is much mention of how the gold that Ponce de Leon expected to find would be divided between him and Ferdinand, but there is no mention of any miraculous healing water.

"Peter Martyr, a Spanish historian, was the first to mention the Fountain of Youth in connection with the New World, although not connected with the voyage of de Leon," said Hammel. "Martyr actually seems to be indicating, in a rather convoluted way, that the fountain was located somewhere close to the Bay of Honduras, but later translations give the location of Bahamas and then Florida as the home of the fountain."

The connection between Ponce de Leon and the fountain appears to have first been made by Spanish historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, who wrote in his 1535 Historia General y Natural de las Indias that the explorer was a desperate man who was seeking the Fountain of Youth as a cure for his sexual impotence. The scant records of Ponce de Leon's life don't seem to bear this out, unless it was a recent problem for the explorer – at the time of his voyage, he was the father of several young children.

According to Hammel, it's not known why de Oviedo wrote this. Perhaps he'd been assured it was the truth, or perhaps he had some personal grudge against the de Leon family. Juan Ponce de Leon was unable to defend his penis' reputation; he had been dead for almost 15 years by the time the book was published.

And although the city of St. Augustine now boasts the only advertised Fountain of Youth, it's quite possible the explorer actually made landfall a hundred or more miles down the coast. South of Cape Canaveral near Melbourne Beach is the most often cited spot.

"Whatever the truth may be, Ponce de Leon's memory has certainly been made a bit less glorious than he deserves by the foolish tales that he set off to find some fountain of fable," said one of the park's guides, who asked that his name be withheld since he was not espousing the standard tour spiel.

"Even though I work here in this beautiful park, it amazes me that tales of fountains of youth persist, as well as that old nonsense that Columbus set off to prove the world wasn't flat," the guide said. "Some of our guests come believing the story that de Leon set off to find the fountain; a few know that he did not and enjoyed this place very much anyway."

The park grounds are beautiful, but the exhibits are that strange mixture of low-tech charming and übertacky that is so often a hallmark of Florida roadside attractions. There's a slew of diorama-type exhibits, all with brightly painted backgrounds, plenty of plastic floral tributes to the great explorer and a spinning globe that maps the "first 100 years of Spanish New World conquest, all in eight minutes!"

The gift shop offers empty bottles of all sizes, which can be filled with water from the spring, should you feel the need for youth booster shots after you head down the highway.

Despite the fact that the waters from the fountain did not make me feel younger than springtime, there is widespread belief that sulfur-rich mineral water can heal the aches and pains of old age, cleanse the body of acquired environmental pollutions, purify the skin and even chase away demons.

"It's more likely the warmth of the water that people bathe in when they visit healing springs or therapeutic bath houses that has an effect, not the sulfur," said Florida chiropractor Charles Arkon. "Drinking water that's rich in sulfur wouldn't relieve aches and pains, nor does it have any rejuvenating powers."

Damn.

(Michelle Delio and photographer Laszlo Pataki are nearing the end of their four-week, geek-seeking journey along U.S. Route 1. If you know a town they should visit, a person they should meet, a weird roadside attraction they must see or a great place to fuel up on lobster rolls, barbecue, conch fritters and the like, send an e-mail to wiredroadtrip@earthlink.net.)